“The sudden approximation of my dull, provincial life to a New Yorker cartoon was exhilarating.”

“If it weren't for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.”

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”

“If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.”

“But how could he admire Joyce’s lengthy, libidinal ‘yes’ so fervently and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life? I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

“Perhaps I identify too well with my father's illicit awe. A trace of this seems caught in the photo, just as a trace of Roy has been caught on the light-sensitive paper...It's a curiously ineffectual attempt at censorship. Why cross out the year and not the month? Why, for that matter, leave the photo in the envelope at all?In an act of prestidigitation typical of the way my father juggled his public appearance and private reality, the evidence is simultaneously hidden and revealed.”

“At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then”